Market
Building a market in a city allows the player to buy and sell resources with other players. Such trading is allowed only between buyers and sellers in the same province. Inter province trading and profit making strategies are possible, but requires resources to be transported to a city in another province for them to be sold there. Increasing the level of the market allows an additional buy or sell transaction. A buy transaction typically requires 30 minutes to complete but can be made instantaneous by using the Caravan portal speed up. A sell transaction must wait for other players to purchase the resources. Sell transactions can be canceled by the player at any time, and are canceled if the city comes under attack. Gotchas *Buy transactions cannot be canceled. After placing the order, you may realized you needed to spend money on other resources, that there was an error in the order, or that you should have placed a higher priority transactions first (eg- you troops will starve if you don't have food in the next 40 minutes. Be careful because buy orders cannot be undone except by an attacking army. * Using markets to hide resources Some sites falsely advise that players can prevent resources from falling into a conquering armies' hands by placing them for sale in the market at a price higher than any player would pay. This advice is incorrect and such resources will in fact be seized if the city is conquered. This technique is nonetheless useful in some cases since it can be used to hide the existence of excess resources from a scout. :The major disadvantage to using markets to hide resources is that it costs Gold to start the transaction since the seller must pay tax before the resources will be listed for sale. Putting your resources on the Market at a high price to ensure that they do not sell means that the Gold you pay for the Tax will be extremely high since it is proportionate to the sale price. The tax can be so high that you might not have enough Gold to begin the transaction in the first place. Note that the Gold you pay for the Tax will NOT be returned to you once you cancel the transaction. Benefits Using the Market There are 24 different markets in each domain, one for each province. You will not be able to arrange market trades with players in global chat unless you both have cities in the same province. Resources are always sold in multiples of 1,000 units. There is a limit of 999,000 resources that can be bought or sold in a single transaction. To deal in larger quantities, you will have to make multiple transactions. Units may be priced down to the thousandth of a gold piece (3 places after the decimal). The market will always charge you a Trading Fee of 0.5% of the gold value of the requested transaction. This fee must be paid to submit the transaction and it will be lost if you later cancel the transaction before it completes. Resources or gold in bid are removed from your inventory and held in the market until the bid is accepted or the trade is canceled. If your city is attacked while your resources are held in bid, those bids will be canceled and the resources and gold will be available to be plundered by the attackers. Incomplete sell orders may be canceled at any time. Your resources will be returned to your inventory immediately, minus the Trading Fee. Completed transactions cannot be canceled. Once a transaction is accepted, the gold is given to the seller immediately. The buyer must wait 30 minutes for the purchased resources to arrive in their city, or use a Caravan Portal item to have them delivered immediately. Buying Resources In the Buy section you see what resources are for sale. Click on a resource to find out the prices for that resource. You can see in the picture that there are 1.748.000 units of food being sold for 1 gold per unit. To buy, enter an amount into the writing section and click on the buy button. Selling Resources Selling resources is a bit of an art. You have to sell it at a price that people will be willing to buy it for, but you also want to make a large profit on the resources you worked so hard on building. Stone is hardly ever necessary, so it should be sold for cheap or else no one will buy it. Wood and ore are always needed, and can go for high prices in the market. The best way to judge on how much to sell for is to look at the current prices. If the lowest cost in there is 17, try selling for 12. Yours will be bought first because it is cheaper, but its not an over-the-top price. If the lowest cost is 5, sell for 4.5. There isn't a specific formula to figuring this out. Its just a lot of guess and check. Food is always in demand. The higher might players always need more food to feed their hungry troops. Even though selling for over 20 is nearly impossible the market sets the demand and you could get away with very high prices. When calculating if a sale will be worthwhile you can also use the following formulas: *Q = Quantity of Good *PA = Price paid per good *PB = Price received per good *FA = Fee to purchase from market *FB = Fee to put up on market *Market tax rate = 0.005 *CA= Cost to purchase from market **CA = Q * PA + Q * PA * 0.005 *CB = Cost to put up on Market **CB = Q * PB * 0.005 *Return = Q * PB - CA – CB *When return = 0, *PA + PA * 0.005 = PB - PB * 0.005 *For return > 0, *PA + PA * 0.005 < PB - PB * 0.005 Use the final calculation to determine if the sale is going to worthwhile. When the quantity is constant and you know the Price paid per good you can determine what your minimum Price received per good should be. If the side with the PB’s work out less than the side with the PA’s then you are going to be working at a loss and the sale is not worthwhile. Using the market for storage space When your inventory of a resource reaches your capacity, your fields will stop production. You can use the market to temporarily remove resources from your inventory to allow your production to continue. Do this by placing a Sell bid for your resources that is higher than the lowest "for sale" bid on the current market. The idea is that no one will buy your overpriced resources when there is a lower price available, so you can leave the resources there until you need them. When you need them back, cancel the transaction and the resources will be returned to your inventory. Caveats: *Unfilled bids use up transactions in your market. You are allowed 1 transaction for each level of your market. Make sure you have additional slots open for other sales while you hold your resources this way. *This storage is not free. You must pay the Trading Fee when you place your resources in the market. That fee will be larger the higher you set the price. *There is always a chance that the lower priced bid will be bought out, and your resources will be sold when someone matches your bid. Set your bid price carefully to balance this risk versus the Trading Fee cost. *If your city is attacked while you have resources in storage on a bid, the bid will be canceled immediately. If your Storehouse cannot protect all the extra resources, they can be stolen. This last caveat is why you can no longer protect your gold by placing it on a bid on the market; the Market will return your gold if 100% damage is done to your wall. If an attack is incoming, and you have a lot of gold that you know you are going to lose, go ahead and spend it on the market. Match whatever "for sale" price you can get; whatever it takes to get rid of your gold and place some resources in transit to your city. At worst, you will still lose the gold that was going to be stolen from you anyway. You will probably end up with extra resources instead, and they cannot be stolen while they are in the 30 minute transit from the seller's city. Playing two markets Each market is tied to the province where your city is located. When you are preparing to build your Second City, consider conquering a plain that is located in a different province. Once you build a market in that Second City, you will have two different markets, with different prices available in their bids. You can buy resources from one market, send them between your cities with the speedup from your Relief Station, and sell them in the other city for a profit. This may not be worth the effort, especially if your first city is not close to a province boundary. Category:Buildings Category:Gold Category:Resources Category:Food Category:Wood Category:Stone Category:Ore Category:requirements